"And therefore," exclaims Phips, "it is the reef itself! Marvellous strange it seemed to me that a great Spanish galleon should have shifted at the bottom of the sea--whoever heard of a ship that moved below the water!--yet all would have it so; even you, Woods, thought so yourself! But now I know all. She struck upon a spur of the reef and not the reef itself, and she has never moved. In which direction does the rise of bottom of which you speak begin?"
The diver look't round, tracing his course beneath, and then, pointing to the Boylers, or Bajo, said, "There, sir."
"Why, so 'tis, of course," says Phips. "And, as I say, her keel took the first, or outside spur of the reef as she passed along, and she never got nearer to the main one. She is there! She is there! Hearts up, my lads, we have found the treasure ship!"
I gave the word and up went a roaring cheer from all, one for Phips, one for the galleon, and one for what she had got in her, or about her, if she had broken up. Then Phips, all alive now, gives an order to shift the tender to the spot where Woods did consider the ridge of the spur should be, and bade the diver come along with us in it to go down again. Though, a moment afterwards, he paused, saying in his kindly way,
"Yet no, Woods. You have done enough work for to-day. You shall rest easy. Now, where is that Blackamoor? He shall go."
The negro came forward, his eyes glistening--perhaps with the hope of what he should find--and to him says Phips,
"Get you into the dress, or, since you are new to that, into the diver's chest; that shall do very well for finding of the reef, and, perhaps, the carrack--she cannot be afar. Come, away with you."
So, into the tender got the captain and I and the negro, and the sailors told off to her, and in a few moments we were apeak of the spot where Woods said the reef must be. And then to our astonishment--for we had never been this side of the Boylers before, and, consequently, had never seen any shoal water--of which, indeed, there was little ever--on looking down we saw, not three feet below the surface, the long sharks-toothed back of the spur.
"Great Powers!" says Phips, "'twas here all those years we wasted on the other side, and we never thought to even come round to this. Fools! fools! that we were. We might have had the treasure back into London long ago. Now," says he, turning from his meditations to actions, "now," to the black, "into your tub and down with you."
Nothing loth, for the great beast was as eager for gain as any of us, into the chest did he get and was lowered away, but scarce had the top of it sunk beneath the water when the rope quivered, then the signal was given to haul up, and back he came, and, jumping out of the chest, or bell, exclaimed excitedly,